Cory Doctorow's new novel, "Homeland," is a sequel to his popular "Little Brother." Doctorow's friend Aaron Swartz, a digital activist who helped develop the Web feed format RSS and the news and entertainment site Reddit, was a source of help and inspiration. Swartz wrote an afterword for "Homeland" that was published just after the shocking news that Swartz killed himself on Jan. 11 while under indictment for downloading academic journal articles at MIT. He was 26.

Doctorow, a Canadian native who now lives in London, is a prolific science fiction writer and a blogger and activist who knew Swartz well. As he prepared for a book tour that will bring him to the Portland area this week, Doctorow answered a few questions by email about Swartz, "Homeland" and Oregon science fiction author Jay Lake.

For people who don't know who Aaron Swartz was, could you give a little background on him and how he helped you with your new book, "Homeland"?

Aaron was an activist and entrepreneur. I met him when he was 14 and helping to codify RSS, one of the core Internet standards. He'd come to San Francisco for meetings and my friend Lisa Rein was his chaperone, and we'd look after him, entertain him and introduce him around.

I watched Aaron grow up into someone who helped develop Reddit, a very successful Internet company, and then throw it over to become a full-time activist working on issues of transparency, corruption and free access to public information. He helped engineer the campaign that killed SOPA, the notorious proposed Internet law, and personally liberated about 20 percent of U.S. case-law, which was only available at 10 cents per page, meaning that Americans had to pay to find out what their own laws were.

When I started work on "Homeland," I knew it would revolve around a next-generation, technology-driven political campaign, so I asked a bunch of people who worked on digital campaign strategy for ideas. Aaron was the only one with anything usable, and his answer was so great that people who read about it frequently email me to ask if anyone is working on it, and whether they can help.

Then I asked Aaron and my friend Jacob Appelbaum (from Wikileaks) to write afterwords for the book -- letters to younger versions of themselves, giving them guidance on what they could do next. Both of them wrote these stirring calls-to-arms that are just brilliant, exactly the message I'd hoped for.

What prompted you to write "Homeland," the sequel to "Little Brother," and what's the impact of "Little Brother" been, especially among younger readers?

A couple of years ago, it occurred to me that the emergency had become permanent. Declaring war on an abstract noun like "terror" meant that we would forever be on a war footing, where any dissent was characterized as treason, where justice was rough and unaccountable, where the relationship of the state to its citizens would grow ever more militarized.

But this permanent emergency didn't have any visible battlefront -- it was a series of largely invisible crises in the form of brutal prosecutorial overreach, police crackdowns, ubiquitous surveillance, merciless debt-hounding and repossession.

I wanted to write a story that helped kids see this invisible, all-powerful crisis unfolding around them, and helped them see that it didn't have to be that way, that they could push back.

I've heard from thousands and thousands of kids who were influenced by "Little Brother," kids for whom it was an inspiration to become makers, programmers and activists. I wanted to reach these kids again, and their little sisters and brothers, and show them that the fight goes on and it needs them.

You publish your books through Tor, a traditional publisher, and also license them for free through Creative Commons. What are your reasons for doing this, and how has it worked? Do you think it would be as effective for a less-established writer?

When I first started doing Creative Commons releases, I was told that the only reason I could do this successfully was because I was an unknown writer. Now I hear that the only reason I can do this is because I'm a well-known writer. It seems you can't win.

Let's be clear: CC licenses or not, anyone who wants to get any ebook for free can do so with just a couple of clicks. Any entertainment product that people love will be immediately and unstoppably copied on the Internet, forever. Anyone who claims otherwise is either deluded or selling something (probably a badly thought-through, unworkable anti-copying scheme).

So having seen that reality, I decided to accommodate myself to it. By performing generosity and trust for my audience, I give them a framework and reason for cooperating with me, rather than subverting me. After all, people only pirate books that they love, so I give them a way to use that love to help me and work with me. Commercially, all I care about is making more sales on balance. That is, I want to be sure that I get more new paying readers through the free publicity I get than I lose readers to the free alternative. I don't need to get paid by everyone who reads -- I need to get read by everyone who pays.

Morally, giving my books away means that they aren't part of the rubric for adding censorship and surveillance to the Internet through corrupt and ineffectual copyright laws. It also acknowledges that I've always copied -- if I was 17 years old today, I'd have exobytes of music and videos piled up around the house, just like I had photocopies and cassettes in the late 1980s -- and so does everyone I know. I don't want to be the kind of hypocrite who says it was normal and just when I did it, but a crime when you do it.

Finally, there's the artistic satisfaction of making art for the 21st century. If everything people love will be copied, then making contemporary art demands that copying be part of the plan. I don't mind people making retro art: if you want to use a quill pen, or make your own gesso in eggshells, or re-enact the Civil War, go ahead. But as a science fiction writer, I should be engaged in the present, if not the future, and in the present, art that people love gets copied. Describe your websites, craphound.com and boingboing.net, for those who aren't familiar with them.

Boing Boing is a technology/culture/politics/entertainment website co-edited by me and three friends, Mark Frauenfelder, Xeni Jardin and David Pescovitz, with our managing editor Rob Beschizza and our freelancers. We write about weird, wonderful, infuriating things, providing a kind of endless, continuous stream of stuff to make you into a happy mutant. It's one of the most widely read sites on the Net, and has millions and millions of readers from all over the globe.

I'm extraordinarily lucky to have happened upon this form and medium -- if I'd been born 20 years earlier, Boing Boing probably would have been a photocopied zine with 1 percent of the reach (BB was, in fact, originally founded as a print zine in the 1980s).

Craphound is where I give away copies of my books, link to my articles and speeches, and host a weekly podcast of me reading from my novels, stories and nonfiction.

Has your work as a technology activist affected your fiction, and vice versa?

Absolutely. The job of a science fiction writer is to use tales about the future to reflect on how technology is invisibly shaping the present. The job of an activist is to use technology to shape the present. These two tasks are so intimately related that I can't really separate them.

Science fiction puts meat on the abstract bones of technology arguments. It's one thing to talk about surveillance being "creepy," but it's hard to convey what you mean until there's books like "1984" and useful adjectives like "Orwellian."

In other words, science fiction is a way of expressing emotively and narratively the policy concerns of activists, and activism is a way of turning the concerns raised in science fiction into an agenda for change. You offered to have your face 3-D scanned as a fundraiser for Jay Lake, a science writer who lives in Milwaukie and is undergoing cancer treatment. Do you know Jay and his work?

Of course! Jay and I are both winners of the Campbell Award for best new writer, given out at the Hugos, and I've reviewed and blurbed his (excellent) books, been on panels with him, eaten with him and generally palled around with him. He contributed a signed copy of his cancer diagnosis to my With A Little Help short story project, and it was bound into a one-of-a-kind limited hardcover edition. Like so many of us in science fiction, I am rooting for Jay and follow his saga closely.